Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta," Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
Department of Neuroscience, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS, Milan, Italy.
Biotechnol Bioeng. 2021 Aug;118(8):2886-2905. doi: 10.1002/bit.27816. Epub 2021 May 24.
The gut microbiota directly impacts the pathophysiology of different human body districts. Consequently, microbiota investigation is an hot topic of research and its in vitro culture has gained extreme interest in different fields. However, the high sensitivity of microbiota to external stimuli, such as sampling procedure, and the physicochemical complexity of the gut environment make its in vitro culture a challenging task. New engineered microfluidic gut-on-a-chip devices have the potential to model some important features of the intestinal structure, but they are usually unable to sustain culture of microbiota over an extended period of time. The integration of gut-on-a-chip devices with bioreactors for continuous bacterial culture would lead to fast advances in the study of microbiota-host crosstalk. In this review, we summarize the main technologies for the continuous culture of microbiota as upstream systems to be coupled with microfluidic devices to study bacteria-host cells communication. The engineering of integrated microfluidic platforms, capable of sustaining both anaerobic and aerobic cultures, would be the starting point to unveil complex biological phenomena proper of the microbiota-host crosstalks, paving to way to multiple research and technological applications.
肠道微生物群直接影响人体不同部位的病理生理学。因此，微生物组的研究是一个热门的研究课题，其体外培养在不同领域引起了极大的兴趣。然而，微生物对外界刺激（如采样程序）非常敏感，且肠道环境的物理化学性质复杂，这使得其体外培养成为一项具有挑战性的任务。新型工程化的肠道芯片设备具有模拟肠道结构一些重要特征的潜力，但通常无法长时间维持微生物群落的培养。将肠道芯片设备与生物反应器集成用于连续细菌培养，将推动对微生物组-宿主相互作用的研究取得快速进展。在这篇综述中，我们总结了用于微生物群连续培养的主要技术，作为上游系统与微流控设备相结合，以研究细菌-宿主细胞的通讯。能够维持厌氧和需氧培养的集成微流控平台的工程化将是揭示属于微生物组-宿主相互作用的复杂生物学现象的起点，为多种研究和技术应用铺平道路。
